Does music work in political campaigns?

La jour de gloire est arrivée. Things can only get better. It's time. Born in the USA. Keep on rockin' in the free world.

Can music change anything when it is used in political campaigns?

Come with us now as we travel through various countries and multiple songs and anthems which have been devised to sway the voter. Some have been written especially for the task, some have been repurposed and some have been deployed in the teeth of fierce opposition from the people who actually wrote them in the first place.

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Transcript

Music, Campaigns and Elections

La Marseillaise

What do All You Need Is Love and Casablanca have in common? They both feature the first great political song of the modern era: La Marseillaise, now France’s national anthem.

It's 1792. King Louis XVI of France declares war on the Habsburg forces massing on his country's eastern borders. In Strasbourg the mayor asks his friend, an army engineer called Claude Rouget de Lille, to compose a song to galvanise the French troops.

Rouget has been described as a prolific, mediocre and highly unsuccessful composer of operas and songs. But as Stefan Zweig puts it in his essay on La Marseillaise: “For one night it was granted to the lieutenant commander to be a brother of the immortals: out of the opening of the song, taken from the street and the newspapers, creative words form at his command and rise into a verse that in its poetic expression, is as abiding as the melody is immortal.”

You don't need me to tell you that of all national anthems, possibly alongside Germany's, it has the most irresistible and rousing melody. It was composed to accompany soldiers as they marched and its lyrics are chillingly bloody.

The blood-stained standard is raised,
Do you hear in the countryside,
Those blood-thirsty soldiers ablare?
They're coming right into your arms
To tear the throats of your sons, your wives!

However, it did provide a template for what could be achieved by harnessing the power of music to a political or in this case military struggle. And ever since many political campaigns have commissioned a song or anthem felt to be fitting or rousing. Some with more success than others. There’s no absolute mathematics to writing a stirring song. You’ve got to be populist, lucky and be capable of distilling a movement into a phrase, a riff or a genre of music your target audience instinctively feels is theirs. Here are some other intriguing case studies from down the ages.


Jamaica 1978

Bob Marley perhaps wisely didn't directly get involved in the vexed politics of Jamaica. However that is not to say that he was not a political singer. He knew as well as anyone that in order to accomplish his goals of greater equality in Jamaican society, an end to the suffering of the poor and the creation of a social movement to enable those things, he had to work with politicians that did have the power to make such changes.

The One Love Peace Concert held in the outdoor national stadium in Kingston in 1978 is sometimes referred to as the Reggae Woodstock. it was certainly the longest and most political reggae concert ever staged and indeed one of the most remarkable musical events ever recorded.

It had its genesis when two notorious rival gang leaders Bucky Marshall and Claude Massop were held together in a prison cell. The cities ghettos had been torn apart by the gun battles between the two leaders’ gang warfare. Massop supporting the Jamaica Labor Party and Marshall favouring Michael Manley’s ruling Peoples National Party, the PNP. The two sides declared an uneasy truce and the peace concert was planned to celebrate the ending of the killings.

Every major and minor reggae artist from that era took place in the event from Althea and Donna at the start of the day via Big Youth and Peter Tosh through to Bob Marley as its culmination. The climax came after midnight during the performance of the song Jamming when Bob Marley got the two party leaders up on stage to link hands with him and symbolise their unity.

Unfortunately the event did little to quell the political violence. The event’s organisers Massop and Marshall were both killed within two years after the concert. The following election year in 1980 would see 889 reported murders in Jamaica - over 500 more than the previous year.

Like Woodstock, it’s hard to conclude that, beyond the thrill of the day, the fragile togetherness of such concerts survive to genuinely change deeper societal and structural issues. See perhaps also Live Aid.


Australia 1972

To be reductive, there are two main political campaign messages. One which says we're in government, you can trust us, we know what we're doing, don't risk changing horses midstream, it's working. The other one says it’s clearly not not working, it's a disaster, the wheels have come off. The ruling party are corrupt inefficient, they don't know what they're doing, you've never had it so bad. This latter message resonates most strongly when a ruling party has been in power for some considerable time. For listeners in the UK 1997 and the end of 2024 are cases in point. More on them later.

In Australia in 1972 the Liberal/National Party had been in power since 1949. Three years previously a Labour candidate in a solid Liberal seat had devised a pamphlet headed 'It's time for a change'. He managed a swing of 19% off the back of it. Gough Whitlam, the federal Labour leader was suitably impressed. 'It's time for a change' sewed a seed in Gough Whitlam’s imagination.

In advertising once you hit on a creative idea everything becomes relatively straightforward. Start with the idea of time for change and then write a song about it. It featured a who's who of Australian celebrities, some of whom might be known outside the country, in particular the actors Jack Thompson and Jackie Weaver. But what the song enabled Gough Whitlam to do was construct a framework within which he could communicate his laundry list of proposed policies. It's time to give more help to women and young people, it’s time to open up the economy, it’s time for universal health insurance, it’s time to reduce land and housing costs.

Would Whitlam have been elected as he was, without the song and the idea? That’s unprovable either way, as is every campaign song. But it certainly helped. It provided simplicity and clarity, two things frequently missing from unsuccessful campaigns. Music can do that, with its emphasis on simple messaging and memorable choruses which become earwowms.

In advertising as well there's a thing called a benefit ladder. And the next rung up from it's time for change is let’s empower people to bring about change themselves. From a rational benefit to an emotional benefit, if you will. And that was what Barack Obama tapped into with his 'Yes We Can' song and campaign in 2008.


UK 1997

Now we are going to move on to our last two episodes where music and politics collided, but unlike our first 3 examples, where the musicians involved had at best an ambivalent relationship with the politicians who embraced their songs.

First we come to the 1992 election in the UK. Now five years earlier the Labour Party had held a rally in Sheffield which some think was a contributory factor in losing them that election. Subsequent analysis throws considerable doubts over that hypothesis. However its mood of triumphalism was tempered my musical interludes. Labour had always had the theme song of 'Keep the red flag flying' from its early unionist days and on this occasion they fielded the Brighouse and Rastrick brass band. It was hardly calculated to appeal to younger voters.

Five years later young trendy dynamic leader Tony Blair, advised by his young trendy dynamic team, identified music as a way in which the Labour Party could reach out to a younger demographic. And they found the perfect song. Perhaps influenced by the ‘It's time’ campaign in Australia, there was heavy use of the D:ream song ‘Things can only get better’ throughout campaigning.

It has to be said it was a perfect encapsulation of how many people in the country were feeling in May 1997. The incumbent Tory government, as many governments do after being in power for almost two decades, was collapsing in on itself in a morass of corruption and directionlessness. It felt indeed like things could only get better. They could hardly get any worse.

The composers of the song were initially happy to be associated with it, not least, one imagines, for commercial reasons. However over time the country fell out of love with Tony Blair. And for the 2024 election the group prohibited Labour from using their song.

Did it ultimately make much difference? It's virtually impossible to disentangle the contribution of music to any election. But there's a certain melancholy in recalling how that song encapsulated a moment in time. Fresh-faced Tony Blair, the wall of voices intoning the sentiment of things getting better – a fantastically imprecise distillation of policy which worked - the cute awkward dancing of the Labour MPs. Noel Gallagher’s shaking hands with Tony Blair at #10.

In a funny little twist as Rishi Sunak of the Conservatives unexpectedly called the general election in 2024 in the pouring rain, through loud speakers at the end of Downing Street could clearly be heard the strains of 'Things can only get better', cranked up by a merry japester. Labour probably need a new tune now, but the old one had one last contribution in it.


USA 1984 and 2024        

In September 1984, during the US election campaign, conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece called ‘A Yankee Doodle Springsteen’, in which he praised Springsteen as an example of classic American values. He wrote “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any.  but flags waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems  always seem punctuated by a grand cheerful affirmation - Born in the USA.” The Republican Party made inquiries as to whether they might use the song, which were politely rebuffed by Springsteen’s management.

But at a campaign stop in New Jersey Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate, added the following to his speech. “America's future rests in 1000 dreams inside your heart. It rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

Springsteen was less than impressed and immediately moved to disavow such an endorsement. However the difficulty is that although the song is an analysis of the problems a Vietnam vet experiences on returning to the USA, that's not what people are hearing. All they get out of it is 'Born in the USA'. Which sounds like a national anthem. It's a bit like 'You've got to fight for your right to party' by the Beastie Boys. Essentially a parody of a rabble-rousing song. But the irony is lost on frat boys shouting ‘You've got to fight for your right to party!’.

In 2000 the journalist Brian Dohertyty noting that political song lyrics are often either misunderstood or not understood at all wrote: “But who's to say Reagan wasn't right to insist the song was an upper? When I hear those notes and that drum beat and the boss’s best arena-stentorian shout-groan vocals come over the speakers I feel like I'm hearing the national anthem.”

We talked at the top of the programme about Neil Young, his song Rockin' in the free world and how it's been appropriated by Donald Trump for his campaigns. Born in the USA has never gone out of fashion for Republican leaders and Trump is no exception. It was heard at rallies and outside the hospital where he was being treated for COVID in October 2020. All this, despite the fact Springsteen himself has gone on record calling Trump a flagrant toxic narcissist, a moron and a threat to our democracy.

However that's not how music works. Does anyone know the verses to God save the queen, especially that one about smashing the Scots. How many realise that the main refrain in La Marseillaise is:
 
Grab your weapons, citizens!
Form your battalions!
Let us march! Let us march!
May impure blood
Water our fields!

In the words of the late great Daniel Kahnemann, people are cognitive misers. They specialise in mental shortcuts and think fast, not slow. All people actually hear are the stirring chords, an impassioned vocal, one lyric which may be 'Things can only get better', or 'Born in the USA' and that's it, job done. Everything else is detail.